The promise of artificial intelligence in marketing has a way of making executives reach for metaphors involving jet packs and warp drives. But at Rockwell Automation, the 120-year-old Milwaukee company that makes the controls and robotics humming inside manufacturing plants worldwide, the path to the future turned out to look less like science fiction and more like a two-and-a-half-year argument with a customer relationship management system.

The company took home the ROI Award at Forrester's B2B Summit in Phoenix this year, a recognition that measures not just return on investment but, as the research firm would have it, return on integration — the sort of cross-functional collaboration that sounds obvious in theory and proves elusive in practice.

"For us to achieve the transformation we were driving, we couldn't have done it just within marketing," said Brian Hovey, the chief marketing officer of Rockwell Automation. "There's so much interdependency between marketing and sales, commercial operations and IT. That was the special sauce."

By 2023, Mr. Hovey said, the company's demand engine was not keeping pace with its ambitions. Revenue processes ran in silos. Data was scattered. The CRM system had not achieved the kind of adoption that would make it genuinely useful. (One imagines the software gathering dust like exercise equipment purchased in January.)

The remedy was not glamorous. Working with Forrester, Rockwell rebuilt its opportunity-to-revenue model from the business processes up, a migration that landed in the summer of 2025 and began showing results in the fiscal year that started in October.

"If you don't have a strong data foundation, if you don't have strong business process, AI is not going to work," Mr. Hovey said. "You can't take the latest shiny technology, throw it into a bad situation and expect a good outcome."

It is the sort of observation that will not fit on a keynote slide, which may be precisely the point.

Original story published in The Drum: "How Rockwell Automation built a demand engine fit for the AI era | The Drum"